Athens: Mycenae & Epidaurus Tour

Departure. 8:45pm, Sunday night. The airport at Brisbane was effectively dead, save for a few stray French perfumers and the odd Asian tourist. After making our way onto the plane, Shannon was pleasantly surprised with the amount of space and the size of the seats that we would be sitting in for our first flight of fourteen hours. Delighted, even. Though it did not take long for her to realise that we were being coaxed through the Business Class section and towards the Sardine section. This aside, the seating was not particularly bad, and we didn't have such an annoying flight. There was a tour group consisting of what we assume were a Christian mission group on their way to Africa (they were all wearing matching shirts with Africa stitched on), and we both decided we hadn't seen an uglier collection of people since they stopped filming Sex & The City. There always seemed to be at least two of them standing up, as well. It's like they needed to be talking to each other all the time. AND the two sitting in front of us pushed their chairs into "recline" position literally .4 seconds after the seatbelt sign went off, which really *Parental Guidance Advised* shit us RIGHT off - okay, it's a long flight, and you can't be expected to not do it at some point, but at least wait until we've left Brisbane airspace. Rude bastards. The rest of the plane trip was relatively uneventful, except for Shannon failing to lock the plane toilet door and being walked in on by a random guy, and some guy in the seat behind playing a four hour game of footsie with Shannon over the course of the flight. Though creeped out, Shannon later admitted to me that she enjoyed the interaction (just kidding). All jokes aside, I am pleased to announce in this forum that my record of never having used an aeroplane lavatory continues!

We landed in Dubai at 5am local time, and had a five hour wait until our next five hour flight. Would you like more fives with that? The next plane was considerably smaller than the first, and older. It didn't so much have TV screens as it had ex-Cold-War era missile shield monitors. A plus was that it wasn't a full flight. A negative is that four bastards, who I assumed were named Nikolaos, Yannis, Giorgos and Konstantinos (or at least they should be), unfurled their hairy Grecian frames out across all of the spare seats near us. Not happy, Stavros. But we got over it, and landed in Athens without issue. Quick through the customs, and out to the Metro. We navigated our way to the hotel, which is close to the Akropoli metro station, though we lapped the adjacent metropolitan area just trying to find the place (though in my defence, if we had turned "right" out of the metro instead of "left", as per my suggestion, we would have found said hotel within approximately fifteen seconds). Shannon defends her advice to turn "left" by saying that we would have missed out on a glorious journey of discovery should we not have made this error, pointing out that the discovery of penicillin was also a mistake. Plus, quote Shannon: "We got some sweet Parthenon views".

This is true. Our hotel is actually called the Parthenon Hotel, and it is only a few minutes away from the Parthenon. We dumped our things at the hotel and, though we were exhausted, we decided to go for a walk around the base of the Acropolis. We discovered a scenic lookout nearby that had a great view up at the adjacent Acropolis, and spent a good half hour taking pictures and absorbing the sights from the surrounding Athenian suburbs. Pretty breathtaking.

The next day, we awoke at 6:30am local to get ready for our tour for the day - to Epidaurus and Mycenae. Hotel breakfast buffet was very decent - so decent, in fact, that Shannon discussed how decent it was for at least an hour and a half after we had finished eating. Ok, maybe not for that long, but she definitely mentioned that it was enjoyable. This is in most part to my downplaying the quality of such breakfasts to her at an earlier time. I fear now that Shan will have such high expectations of future breakfasts that nothing will measure up. I will make it my mission to lower these expectations once again.

After pickup, the tour stopped at a hotel in order to pick up the guide and to allow those of us who had been on board for a while to use the bathroom. Shannon decided to go for this option, though she experienced great difficulty navigating which side of the rotating glass door to enter. This resulted in a hilarious door in the face moment, which I am deeply upset that I missed recording on film for posterity, as I think it would probably have been funnier than watching Justin Beiber do the same thing earlier in the year.

The tour first visited Corinth and the epic canal, of which construction only recently finished (120ish years ago) despite the design being based on centuries old Roman engineering.

We then headed to Mycenae, and the ancient Kingdom of Agamemnon (played by Brian Cox in the recent classic film "Troy", also starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom). We had a great opportunity to take some film and some pictures, and walk through the Kingdom. 'Twas epic.

After this, we visited an old Tomb located nearby (The Treasury of Atreus), and then we went on to the Ampitheatre at Epidaurus, which was relatively breathtaking. Great acoustics, too - you can hear somebody whispering from the stage even at the top/back of the theatre. Acoustics so good, they even made my falsetto rendition of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" sound almost angelic. Shannon concurs. Sort of.

Here's a picture of us, with an awesome dude named Harry who was also on the tour:

The tour group was small, which was good for us, and the tour guide was very friendly and knowledgeable. For example, she referred to another tour member as "San Francisco" after he made the mistake of revealing where he was from (Harry). She had no qualm pointing out that, for an Australian, my skin is extremely pale. I pointed out that, unlike the Greeks, we are not blessed with naturally olive skin - we have useless British skin, which does not tan, but burns. She conceded the high ground.

That's all for now. Tomorrow, we head to Delphi and then on to Meteora.

Zach & Shan.